Sapphire HD 5870, first glance

Sapphire has been kind enough to send us the first of the two DX11 graphics cards. This is the new AMD card dubbed the Radeon HD 5870, based on the Cypress graphics processor. HD 5870 performance has so far proven to be excellent even when compared with some much pricier cards, as it manages to beat even the dual GPU Radeon HD 4870 X2 in some tests.

The Cypress GPU has double the amount of shaders the previous Radeon generation has had (now up to 1600). ROPs and texture units have gotten an overhaul as well, and the card has more than 2GFLOPs of computing power.

Sapphire's HD 5870 card has large reference dual slot cooling covering the entire card. With this card you'll get the game Battlestations Pacific as well as a coupon for a free Dirt 2 game - which will show some of the DirectX 11 tricks.

As you can see from a couple of preliminary results, Sapphire HD 5870 is a seriously fast graphics card. We often see it competing even with the dual-GPU HD 4870 X2. As for Nvidia's fastest single-GPU card - Geforce GTX 285, the new Radeon is faster in all the tests. We'll soon have more results so stay tuned.